That's the problem - our choice is between 2 or 3 big players. If we hadn't allowed all the mergers years ago we wouldn't have two players with such a huge share of the market.
Once you start allowing all the small "harmless" mergers you produce bigger and bigger companies, making the case for allowing their competitors to merge to be able to compete. If we get to three, and one gets really strong and one gets really weak, I'm sure we'll be hearing about reasons why we should allow the #2 and #3 players to merge to take on that big bad bully #1.
This is why the US has so many oligopolies, because regulators think it is harmless when a player with 7% and a player with 5% merge in a field of 7 or 8 competitors. That triggers the next merger, and the next, and eventually we get down to a field of 2 or 3 and Europeans wonder how in the heck we pay so damn much for the services they provide.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
